Category Archives: Travel Guides
Old Glory: An American Journey
Navigating the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans, Raban opens himself to experience the river in all her turbulent and unpredictable old glory. Going wherever the current takes him, he joins a coon-hunt in Savana, falls for a girl in St Louis, worships with black Baptists in Memphis, hangs out with the housewives of
Hunting Mr Heartbreak: A Discovery of America
Following in the footsteps of countless emigrants, Jonathan Raban takes ship for New York from Liverpool, to explore how succeeding generations of newcomers have fared in America. He finds a country of massive contrasts, between the Street People and the Air People in New York, between small town and big city, between thrusting immigrants and
For Love & Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling, 1969-87
This collection of writing undertaken for love and money is about books and travel, and makes for an engrossing and candid exploration of what it means to live from writing. Jonathan Raban weighs up the advantages of maintaining an independent spirit against problems of insolvency and self-worth, confesses to travel as an escape from the
Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East
It took Kinglake seven years before he had finished crafting this `lively, brilliant and rather insolent tale. The physical details of the journey, undertaken in 1834 across the Balkan frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, through Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus into the Near eastern cities of Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus, are never as significant as the conversations,
Travels in a Dervish Cloak
Shortlisted for the 2018 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award`s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the YearSpellbound by his grandmother`s Anglo Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror. Seeking
Not a Hazardous Sport: Misadventures of an Anthropologist in Indonesia
Nigel Barley travels to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork `somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there
Hampshire: through writers` eyes
Those who know the downs and chalk streams of Hampshire are quietly fortunate but rarely boastful. So it is fascinating to rediscover this home county, on the eastern edge of Wessex, as a place of extraordinary richness. Those rounded chalk hills have protected not only the ancient capital of Anglo-Saxon England but also the two-thousand-year-old
Coasting
Coasting round Britain single-handed in an antique two-masted sailing boat, Jonathan Raban conducts a masterly exploration of England and the English at the time of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War. He moves seamlessly between awkward memories of childhood as the son of a vicar, a vivid chronicle of the shape-shifting sea and incisive descriptions
An Empire in the East: Three Journeys into Indonesia
Norman Lewis was eighty-three years old when in 1991 he embarked on a series of three arduous journeys into the most contentious corners of Indonesia: into the extreme western edge of Sumatra, into East Timor and Irian Jaya. He never drops his guard, reporting only on what he can observe, and using his well-honed tools
Arabia: Through the Looking Glass
Into Jonathan Raban s familiar Earls Court neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His journey took him through
The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey through Brazil
Unflinchingly honest about his family, his failures, his already broken health at the age of sixty?three and the loss of the hopes he once had for himself, Thomsen is also sickened by the corruption and rapacity of our societies, the inequality and the economic destitution. What starts as an almost reluctant concatenation of memory and
The View from the Ground: Peacetime Despatches, 1936-87
If you want to know about writing, about how to make others share the horror and intensity of an experience, try the first piece in this collection, Justice at Night. Martha Gellhorn wrote it as a 28-year-old, having just returned home to the States after four years in Europe, in 1936. What follows is a
The Face of War: Writings from the Frontline,1937-85
James Cameron admired Martha Gellhorn above all other war-reporters `because she combined a cold eye with a warm heart`. The Chicago Times described her writing as `wide ranging and provocative, a blend of cool lyricism and fiery emotion, alternately prickly and welcoming, funny and stern`. But make your own judgements, and in the process find
On Persephone`s Island: A Sicilian Journal
This is a year of Sicilian life, its seasons and its sacred festivals, its gorgeous fruits and demanding family life, its casual assassinations and village feasts, its weather and the neighbours. It chronicles a life divided between an apartment in the city of Palermo with the weekends and summer devoted to sustaining life in an
A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in Eastern India: Bihar and Orissa
Norman Lewis avoids the easy pleasures of travelling through the hill-forts of Rajasthan, visiting palace hotels and the Taj Mahal. Instead his travels in India begin in the impoverished, overpopulated and corrupt state of Bihar – the scene of a brutal caste war between the untouchables and higher-caste gangsters. From these violent happenings, he heads
Warrior Herdsmen: Life with the Dodoth of Northern Uganda
This is the personal journal of a young American woman, living for six months amongst the Dodoth cattle-herdsmen in Northern Uganda. It is also an adventure story, for during this period the Dodoth were caught up in an escalating cycle of violence with their age-old rivals, the Turkana tribe. The animating tension of this feud
Forgotten Kingdom: Nine Years in Yunnan
Peter Goullart spent nine years in the all-but-forgotten Nakhi Kingdom of south west China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament: to get to know the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans to decide which to back with a loan from the cooperative movement. A Russian by birth, due to his
Between River and Sea: Encounters in Israel and Palestine
Following A Month by the Sea, her acclaimed exploration of life in Gaza, Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of living with and among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in both Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks
Growing: Seven Years in Ceylon 1904-1911
Growing is a portrait of a young man sent straight out from university to help govern Ceylon. It is doubtful that any Empire at any time has been served by such an intelligent, dutiful, hardworking and incorruptible civil servant as the young Leonard Woolf. He was determined to do what was good but discovered for
The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool
The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool presents the unexpected face of Syria. Based on five journeys, undertaken over as many years, Kociejowski`s book is entirely concerned with the slow journey towards friendship. So we learn nothing about coups or conspiracies, iconic monuments or historic travellers. Instead we meet a chance handful of Syrians, such
